Slow progress

Sorry there haven’t been many posts here recently. I have been working on a new web site for someone else which I will announce when it is launched, probably mid November.

While doing that I came across a bug which I first saw years ago and thought would be fixed by now. Back when I first started coding web sites, in 1998 when blogs hadn’t been named but this site performed a similar function, we had to allow for all sorts of browser bugs. Good web pages had special coding to allow for the differences between Internet Explorer and Netscape.

There was still a problem when IE6 came along and, as there is still a lot of it about, that is what I spent all yesterday evening fixing. The current releases of browsers are generally good enough so that you only need to code for their differences if you are very fussy or are using something obscure.

So it came as a surprise that the float & list bullet overlap problem still existed. I have tried to demonstrate it by enclosing the last few paragraphs in a list. The pink image is outside of the list and floated to the left which allows paragraphs to flow around it. This fails in all browsers that I have tried so perhaps it is a specification problem and they are all sticking to the rules. It is surely wrong though.

This entry was posted
on 25 Sep 2008 at 10:56 by Rick and is filed under Browsers, Technical.
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Thanks Sean, I had forgotten where that site was. I seem to have a small problem in Opera 9.52 on Ubuntu as well but as the people with that combination who will visit my site must be very close to zero then I will probably ignore those.

However, I don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore IE6. There is still an awful lot of it about and as this site will be for a real customer not just my hobby blog I have to try and fix it.

btw. I have bypassed the overlapping bullets problem by using “list-style-position: inside;” which is not the effect I really wanted but is better than the fault. There is a workaround by enclosing the whole list in a <div> but that is not practical if the customer is providing content.